


Something Real

by msmorland



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-02
Updated: 2016-11-02
Packaged: 2018-08-28 13:19:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8447461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/msmorland/pseuds/msmorland
Summary: The first time it happens, Arthur is at his favorite hole-in-the-wall in Paris.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first Inception fic ever (and first fic in any fandom in years). Reading all the fic in this fandom has made me fall completely in love with this pairing, and this was the result.

The first time it happens, Arthur is at his favorite hole-in-the-wall in Paris, the place he only comes when he’s absolutely sure he’s safe after the last job. The place where he banters with the waitstaff, who know him well enough to ask him if he’d like his usual dish and glass of wine. It’s the only place in the world he goes often enough to have a usual.

He’s never taken anyone else here. Not Dom, not even Mal. He doesn’t want anyone in dreamshare to know about this place, and Arthur is nothing if not good at keeping secrets.

So when he raises a finger for the check and Marie, the waitress, shakes her head, Arthur doesn’t know at first what she means.

“It’s already been paid for,” Marie tells him in French. “Your meal.”

“By whom?”

Arthur is already plotting out an alternate route to his Parisian flat, wondering if he needs to consider a safe house elsewhere.

But Marie doesn’t seem scared, or even mildly worried. She gives him an enigmatic smile and an _I’m not telling_ wink. Arthur looks around the restaurant, but there aren’t all that many people there, and he’s the only one dining alone. No one is even looking at him.

Still, he leaves the restaurant through the kitchen and takes a long, convoluted route home.

* * *

The second time it happens, Arthur is on a job in Jakarta. The job has been a headache from the start, the kind of headache that almost -- _almost_ \-- makes Arthur long for the days of following Cobb around the world. He’s stuck with an idiot extractor with half of Cobb’s talent for seeing the big picture. A green architect with none of Ariadne’s natural ability. A forger whose imitations fail in the smallest but most significant details.

_A forger with none of Eames’s brilliance._

Arthur has told himself, sternly, to stop thinking about Eames, but apparently he can’t help it. Arthur has always had a thing for Eames, even as he found him insufferable; apparently that’s Arthur’s type, the asshole who makes everything Arthur finds difficult look infuriatingly easy. And Eames has always found it fun to needle Arthur, to mock and challenge him, but that’s all. After the Fischer job, after all of their charged conversations had come to nothing, Arthur had had to accept that that was all. That Eames would flirt with him -- or do something that Arthur, infatuated and perhaps deluded, could classify as flirting -- but that the flirting would never add up to anything more.

Arthur asks for the check in flawless Indonesian. At least, he thinks it’s flawless. When the waiter shakes his head, Arthur reconsiders, wonders whether he’s embarrassed himself with an incorrect verb tense, tries again.

Again, the waiter shakes his head. “Your food’s been paid for, sir,” the waiter says.

“By whom?” Arthur asks.

The waiter shrugs. He has none of Marie’s coyness, but still no fear, either, and this whole scenario is starting to feel disturbingly familiar.

Arthur takes his totem out, rolls it on the restaurant’s bathroom counter. Reality.

Still, Arthur takes the long way back to the warehouse, considering whether he should tell the others the job is off.

* * *

The third time it happens, Arthur has finally caved and called in Eames and Ariadne for a job. They’re in Melbourne, and Eames is doubling as forger and extractor.

Somehow, he has still managed to find the time to fuck off to an art museum for the afternoon. Arthur’s in a restaurant across the street, alternating his glare between the museum’s front doors and the paperwork in front of him. Somewhere in there, Arthur’s sure, Eames is flirting the pants off an attractive museum-goer, while Arthur pages through the files over and over again, double- and triple-checking for anything he might have missed.

With Ariadne and Eames on board, the job feels smoother than any Arthur’s had in months. But when Eames is around, Arthur knows, he has a tendency to miss things. He has a tendency -- and it’s humiliating even to acknowledge this to himself, in the privacy of his own head -- to drift off. To daydream. To find himself imagining conversations with Eames -- and the many non-conversational things he’d like to do with Eames -- only to snap back to the present and wonder, dazedly, how he’s gotten there.

Eames makes Arthur, usually so controlled, organized, and in charge, lose his grip on reality.

Like right now, when Arthur is sure he sees Eames sitting down on the stool across from him, gesturing to the waiter for a glass of wine.

Arthur blinks.

“Woolgathering, pet?” Eames asks, reaching across to snag a croquette from Arthur’s plate.

“Working, Mr. Eames,” Arthur says curtly.

He returns his eyes to the spreadsheet in front of him, fingers on the totem in his pocket.

When he looks up again, Eames is still there, smiling in that way he has that Arthur finds so infuriating. Eames thinks _Arthur_ is condescending, but Arthur thinks there’s no one more condescending than Eames when he smiles that particular smile at Arthur. The one Arthur translates as, _Oh, Arthur, working again. Pity he has to try so hard._

“Something I can do for you, Mr. Eames?”

The question is a mistake: Eames leers, and he looks ready to launch into an innuendo-laden answer when Arthur snaps, “Save it,” and begins gathering up his files. He’s tired of it, seesawing between his fantasies of Eames and what their conversations are like in reality. He nods to the waiter for the check.

This time, when the waiter shakes his head, Arthur can’t even pull up the vestige of curiosity to ask who’s paid for him. He’s tired of this, whatever it is -- long con to get him to drop his guard, secret admirer who can’t be bothered to show himself. He’s done. He wants something real.

“Arthur, wait,” Eames is saying from across the table. “Just let me--”

But Arthur is long gone before he even realizes that Eames used his given name.

* * *

The fourth time it happens, Arthur is fed up enough to lead this... _person_ , whoever it is, on a merry chase.

He’s in Spain, Basque country, in a bar on Legrono’s Calle Laurel. He’s on what he might call a vacation, if Arthur ever took vacations, in the sense that no one is expecting him to be anywhere the next day. It’s crowded and noisy and anonymous and Arthur relaxes, feels himself physically unwinding from the rush of his last job, from the stress of the last few years: Mal dying, Dom running, Arthur hurrying around the world behind him trying to sweep up their footprints.

Arthur downs his _txakoli,_ eats the last of the three _pinxtos_ he chose from the bartop, catches the bartender’s attention.

And then it happens again: the bartender waves off Arthur’s money, shrugs when Arthur tries to find out who’s paid his tab.

“Fine,” Arthur says aloud, looking around, trying to make eye contact with his mystery benefactor. No one is paying any attention.

 _You want to play that game?_ Arthur thinks. _Fine_.

He leaves the bar and weaves up Calle Laurel, choosing his next spot at random. The street is lined with bars like these, tiny places with racks of _txakoli_ and Rioja, bar counters stacked with trays of any food Arthur can think of, most of it piled on slices of baguette. Eames would like it, he thinks, the sheer indulgence of roaming from one bar to the next using carbs for a plate.

Arthur ducks in, points to three of the items on the bartop, eats, goes to pay. 

Yet again, the bartender shakes his head. Arthur’s secret admirer-slash-mystery-annoyance has somehow followed him here.

The same thing happens at the next bar and the next.

Finally, Arthur’s too full to eat anything else and too tired to keep moving. He chooses one last random bar, grabs a glass of wine, red, and settles in at the back. Arthur is always on guard, always watching for danger, always aware of his exits, but he lets himself let go a little bit. Shakes out his shoulders and feels some of the tension drain out.

Eames would like this, too, he thinks -- not just the wining and dining but this quiet, tucked in the back corner of the bar, at the perfect vantage to people-watch. Eames gives the impression of being a breezy extrovert who spouts nonsense more than he pays attention, but he’s actually most in his element, Arthur’s noticed, standing a step or two back from the crowd.

Arthur’s tried even harder to force Eames out of his mind since their job in Melbourne. It had gone fine, no disasters, but Eames hadn’t tried to talk to Arthur again about anything but the job and Arthur, annoyed at himself as much as at Eames, hadn’t minded. The next time he had a job that needed a forger, he’d called someone else.

But Arthur had missed working with Eames. Missed the smooth operation of the job, the way Eames challenged his every idea but always had a suggestion to make that idea better, missed even the stupid pet names. The knowledge that he was working with someone who had his back and wouldn’t run the first moment things went, as Eames would put it, pear-shaped.

Without giving himself time to overthink it, Arthur pulls out his phone and dials Eames. 

Arthur doesn’t expect Eames to pick up, but he does, on the second ring. 

“Arthur?” Eames says. “Hang on--”  
  
Arthur’s gotten used to Eames calling him other things -- _darling_ , _pet_ , names that get more and more treacly the longer a job’s gone and the more time they’ve had to get under each other’s skin -- and he’s not sure what it means that Eames has suddenly shifted back to just _Arthur_.

“Sorry,” Eames says, “Just a tick.”

He hears Eames moving through someplace noisy, a bar, maybe, or a party. Arthur tries not to dwell on the fact that Eames is leaving a party to talk to him.

 _It doesn’t mean anything_ , he reminds himself. Give Arthur’s Eames-obsessed brain an inch and it will take a mile. _None of it means anything._

“You still there, darling?” Eames’s voice comes down the line. He’s gone somewhere marginally quieter, and his voice has gone softer, too. He’s no longer shouting for Arthur to hear.

“I’m still here,” Arthur says.

They stay on the line in silence for a minute or two. The bar noise around Arthur has receded, and most of his focus has narrowed to this, just the fact of his being on the phone with Eames.

Arthur is, he must acknowledge to himself, a hopeless case.

“Not that it isn’t lovely to hear your voice, pet,” Eames says into the silence. “But did you need something? I heard about the Lathrop job but I didn’t think you’d need--”

Arthur clears his throat and says, quickly, before he loses his courage, “There’s no job, actually.”  
  
“Ah,” says Eames.

“I just wanted to…” _say hi? I was people-watching in Legrono and it made me think of you?_ Ugh, no wonder he and Eames always get stuck at this point, at the shift from colleagues-who-flirt to people who have to express what they’re actually feeling.

“I don’t know,” Arthur says. “This was stupid, I was just--”

“Checking whether I made it out after the Williamson job?”

Eames speaks quickly, as if he’s afraid Arthur’s planning another sudden exit. A legitimate fear: Arthur has his finger over the end-call button, hoping to extract himself from embarrassment as rapidly as possible. He’s afraid Eames will say something sarcastic: _Truly, Arthur, I’m touched,_ or _so kind of you to think of me, darling_.

Instead, Eames starts regaling Arthur with a story about the Williamson job, a clusterfuck involving a mark who’d kept a second, secret family on the side and tried to find out whether his opponent for local office knew about it and would expose him. Eames didn’t think anyone in either of the man’s families would be speaking to him for a while.

Before he knows it Arthur is laughing, and then he’s telling Eames about his last job, about the terrible forger who hadn’t observed the mark well enough to notice he’d been embezzling money, about the extraction interrupted by an associate the mark had stiffed.

They go on like this, trading stories about the jobs they’ve had since they’ve last seen each other, the _this would have gone better if you were there_ going unspoken, until the bar around Arthur is emptying and he can hear the sounds of the party Eames had left coming out to join him in the street.

It’s surprisingly pleasant, companionable, and Arthur walks back to his hotel room feeling light.

* * *

The last time it happens, Arthur is back at his favorite hole-in-the-wall, bantering with Marie, eating his usual _poulet basquaise_. He’s just come off a job, and he’s thinking about taking an actual vacation.

He’s thinking, if he’s honest, about tracking down Eames. About saying, _Come to Spain with me and people-watch_. _Come everywhere with me, actually_.

And Eames wouldn’t be able to let the double-entendre pass unremarked, but he would also say yes.

Would he, though? Arthur’s not sure if he’s conflating the real Eames with his fantasy Eames. He’s given Eames chances before.

He decides to pose the question to Marie, because she’s there and a neutral third-party.

“If you had a...colleague,” he says to her in French, unsure, as always, how to describe his relationship with Eames, “who, hypothetically, might be...something more. Would you say something to him?”

Marie smiles what is, for someone who has never met Eames, an oddly knowing smile. “It does not matter what I would do,” she says. “You, I think you will want to say something.”

Arthur’s not sure what Marie means, but he is reminded, strongly, of Mal. He feels her there with him for a moment. She had always liked Eames, thought that Arthur was unfairly hard on him. Arthur had never wanted to admit that she was probably right.

“Maybe you’re right,” Arthur tells Marie.

It's more urgent now, the desire to find Eames, to tell him, to end this dance they’ve been engaged in, one way or another, for years now.

He asks Marie for the check, and she hands him the bill folder with a wink.

When he opens it, there’s no bill inside. Just a folded piece of paper. At the top of the page is a drawing, and it’s unmistakably Eames’s work. It’s Arthur, sitting at his regular table in this very restaurant, glass of wine in hand, looking more utterly relaxed than Arthur remembers ever being in real life. Across from him is a sketched version of Eames. He has his fingers on the stem of his wineglass, but he is most intent on Arthur.

Even Arthur, looking at the drawing, can see it.

Below the sketch is a note.

 _Darling_ , it says. _Don’t you know?_

And yes, Arthur finally has to admit. He does.


End file.
